Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Academy Award-winning filmmaker Oliver Stone has taken on three American presidents in JFK, Nixon, and W. and the most controversial aspects of the war in Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July. He looked at the greed of the financial industry in the Hollywood hit Wall Street and its forthcoming sequel. In South of the Border, his latest documentary out this week in the United States, Stone takes a road trip across South America, meeting with seven presidents about the revolution sweeping the continent. The leftist transformation in the region might be ignored or misrepresented as nothing but "anti-Americanism" in the corporate media, but this film seeks to tell a different story. Stone joins us along with the film’s co-writer, the Pakistani British author and activist Tariq Ali.

Monday, June 21, 2010

To conquer aging and eventually death. We have long been fascinated by the possibility of immortality even as we accepted death as inevitable. However, recent scientific advances suggest that aging and death are genetically programmed and might, someday, be slowed or even eliminated. We are now entering an era in which the exponential growth of technology will soon create a world that we, at the beginning of the 21st century, will hardly recognize. Practical immortality may be a significant part of this world to which Timeship will take us. Created by architect Stephen Valentine, Timeship's six-acre structure will be a center for pioneering research to indefinitely extend the healthy human lifespan, as well as the world's most secure and technologically advanced facility for the storage of cryopreserved biological materials, including DNA, organs for transplant, and whole mammalian organisms.

Wednesday, June 9, 2010

Tens of millions of Americans, lumped into a diffuse and fractious movement known as the Christian right, have begun to dismantle the intellectual and scientific rigor of the Enlightenment. They are creating a theocratic state based on "biblical law," and shutting out all those they define as the enemy. This movement, veering closer and closer to traditional fascism, seeks to force a recalcitrant world to submit before an imperial America. It champions the eradication of social deviants, beginning with homosexuals, and moving on to immigrants, secular humanists, feminists, Jews, Muslims and those they dismiss as "nominal Christians"—meaning Christians who do not embrace their perverted and heretical interpretation of the Bible. Those who defy the mass movement are condemned as posing a threat to the health and hygiene of the country and the family. All will be purged.

Tuesday, June 8, 2010

Since at least the late 1980s, environmental writers have made growing use of the explicit Christian language of "the Creation." Two 1990s books by environmental authors, for example, are Caring for Creation (Oelschlaeger 1994) and Cavenant for a New Creation (Robb and Casebolt 1991). The magazine of the Natural Resources Defense Council describes the need for a greater "spiritual bond between ourselves and the natural world similar to God's covenant with creation" (Borelli 1988). Natural environments isolated historically from European contact are commonly described as having once been an "Eden" or a "paradise" on the earth--similar to the Creation before the fall (McCormick 1989; "Inside the World's Last Eden" 1992).

Such creationist language has also invaded mainstream environmental politics. During his tenure as vice president, Al Gore said that we must cease "heaping contempt on God's creation" (qtd. in Niebuhr 1993). In a 1995 speech remarkable for its religious candor, Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt said that "our covenant" requires that we "protect the whole of Creation." Invoking messages reminiscent of John Muir, Babbitt argued that wild areas are a source of our core "values" because they are "a manifestation of the presence of our Creator." It is necessary to protect every animal and plant species, Babbitt said, because "the earth is a sacred precinct, designed by and for the purposes of the Creator," and thus we can learn about God by encountering and experiencing his creation.

Sunday, June 6, 2010

The less traumatic sexual abuse was when it happened, the more betrayal, guilt, isolation, and shame victims will feel and the more psychological distress and dysfunction they may experience in the aftermath. And because it is backwards, the trauma model is not just failing to help victims; it is actually causing some of the harm it was supposed explain by simultaneously exacerbating the victim's damaging beliefs

Saturday, June 5, 2010

At the heart of this great project of salvation, then, is the creation of a powerful rent- receiving and rent-seeking alliance of banks and other financial institutions who will make billions from trading the emissions permits and who, once the emissions trading scheme is established, will be able to spend hundred of millions in ensuring, as best they can, that repeal is politically impossible.

July 5, 2000: email 0962818260 Mike Kelly, of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, writes to

Mike Hulme and Tim O’Riordan:

Had a very good meeting with Shell yesterday. Only a minor part of the agenda, but I expect they will accept an invitation to act as a strategic

partner, and will contribute to a studentship fund, though under certain conditions.

And they accuse skeptics of “being in the pockets” of Big Oil?

I’m talking to Shell International’s climate change team, but this approach will do equally for the new Foundation, as it’s only one step or so off Shell’s equivalent of a board level. I do know a little about the Foundation and what kind of projects they are looking for. It could be relevant for the new building, incidentally, though opinions are mixed as to whether it’s within the remit.

Thursday, June 3, 2010

...This documentary reveals Canada's darkest secret - the deliberate extermination of indigenous (Native American) peoples and the theft of their land under the guise of religion. This never before told history as seen through the eyes of this former minister (Kevin Annett) who blew the whistle on his own church, after he learned of thousands of murders in its Indian Residential Schools...